New Game of Migration Board Game

One board game for two to four players, manufactured by McLoughlin Brothers of New York. Each player controls 16 wooden game pieces that are colored maroon, tan, light blue, or dark blue. The winner of the game is the first player to move all of their game pieces from their home area into the home area of another player, which, as the game rules explain “cannot be done except by occupying each one of its squares.” Players move pieces one square at a time or jump game pieces for longer moves.

The four corners of the game board include images of two white men and two white women dressed in stereotypical Gilded Age clothing who represent players playing the “New Game of Migration.” The back of the game board features the word “Migration” in gold script against a black background.

To illustrate the “New Game of Migration,” the box cover features Native American men, women, and children riding horses and walking with two dogs. The box depicts the group moving from right to left, which would be a westward direction on a map of the United States. The pictured people wear traditional Native American clothing and carry belongings and weapons including bows and arrows as they travel across a grassy landscape. Several of the horses pull loaded travois, a Native American vehicle for transporting material.

Despite the imagery on the box cover, the game play itself makes no explicit references to Native Americans. Throughout the nineteenth century, though, the United States carried out formal policies to dispossess and forcibly relocate Native Americans, and images and stories about Native Americans on the move were common in contemporary popular culture. The romanticized and stylized illustrations of Native Americans that McLoughlin Brothers chose to illustrate its “New Game of Migration” minimized and ignored the involuntary and violent nature of forced Indian Removal and Native American “migration” in the late nineteenth century.

This collection consists of 1 box, 1 game board, 1 eight-page instructional booklet, and 64 game pieces (the game pieces are housed in a non-period plastic bag).